My elder sister, Casein—Casey, as we always called her—was supposed to be the most like myself, and was less bucked about it than one would have expected. I never made any mistake myself as to which was which. I had not her beautiful lustrous eyes, but neither had she my wonderful cheek. She had not my intelligence. Nor had she my priceless gift for uttering an unimportant personal opinion as if it were the final verdict of posterity with the black cap on. We were devoted to one another, and many a time have I owed my position as temporary parlour-maid in an unsuspicious family to the excellent character that she had written for me.
She married Moses Morgenstein, a naturalized British subject, who showed his love for his adopted country by trading as Stanley Harcourt. He was a striking figure with his coal-black hair and nails, his drooping eye-lashes and under-lip, and the downward sweep of his ingratiating nose. The war found him burning with enthusiasm, and I give here one verse of a fine poem which he wrote and, as I will remember, recited in Mrs. Mopworth’s salon:
I vos in Luntun since t’ree year,
In dis lant I holt so tear,
Inklant, my Inklant!
Mit her overbowering might
If she gonquer in der fight,
M. Morgenstein vill be all right—
Nicht?—
Inklant, my own!
He was a man of diverse talents, and I used to regret that he gave to the tripe-dressing what was meant for the muses. Alas, he was, though indirectly, one of the many victims of the Great War. His scheme for the concealment of excess profits was elaborate and ingenious, and practised with assiduity. His simple mind could not apprehend that elemental honesty was in process of modification. “Vot I maig for myself, dat I keeb, nicht?” he often said to me. And then the blow fell.
However, he has earned the utmost remission to which good conduct could entitle him, and we are hoping that he will be out again by Christmas.
My next sister, Saccharine, was of a filmy and prismatic beauty that was sufficient evidence of her Cohltar origin—our mother, of course, was a Cohltar. I never thought her mind the equal of my own. Indeed, at the moment of going to press I have not yet met the mind that I thought the equal of my own. But about her beauty there was no doubt. In those days—I am speaking of the ’nineties—it was quite an ordinary event for my sister, inadvertently, to hold up an omnibus. The horses pulled up as soon as they saw her, and refused to move until they had drunk their fill of her astounding beauty. I well remember one occasion on which the horses in a West Kensington omnibus met her at Piccadilly Circus and refused to leave her until she reached Highgate, in spite of the whip of the driver, the blasphemy of the conductor, the more formal complaints of the passengers, and direct police intervention.
She was a sweet girl in those days, and I loved her. I never had any feelings of jealousy. How can one who is definitely assured of superiority to everybody be jealous of anybody?
She married a Russian, Alexis Chopitoff. He was a perfect artist in his own medium, which happened to be hair. It is to him that I owe what is my only beauty, and I am assured that it defies detection. At one time life’s greatest prizes seemed to be within his reach. During the war his skill in rendering the chevelure of noted pianists fit for military service attracted official attention, and if he had been made O.B.E. it would have come as no surprise to any of us. Unhappily his interest in the political affairs of his own country led him to annex at Waterloo a despatch-case which, pedantically speaking, did not belong to him. The case unfortunately happened to contain a diamond tiara, and this led to misunderstandings. Nothing could have exceeded the courage of dear Saccharine when she learned that at the end of his sentence he was to be deported.
“It will leave me,” she said, with perfect calm and in words that have since become historical, “in a position of greater freedom and less responsibility.”